Magic
by lonaj
Summary: Unfinished story. AU version of Roxton & Marguerite's first meeting
1. Did You Hear That?

"Did you hear that?" Roxton asked and looked up at Marguerite.  Trying not to watch her busy hands, he'd been studying one of the cave's blue fairy lights -- or as Challenger would have said, the energy matrix manifesting as luminescence.  It was all interpretation.  Where George saw particle physics and equations, Marguerite preferred fairies.  And George wasn't there.  It was just Marguerite, Roxton and the countless glowing blue fairy crystals that lined the cave.

"Hear what?  I didn't hear anything," Marguerite said.  At the moment their refuge was as silent as death.

Finishing her bandaging, Marguerite rocked back on her heels and inspected her handiwork.  Underneath the makeshift bandage cut from a blanket, angry black, blue and bleeding red gouges crisscrossed Roxton's chest in just about the pattern an infant tyrannosaurus rex might make threshing an uninvited nest mate.  Actually there'd been two infant "t's", both still dark green and gold.  That had made them two weeks old, maybe less.

Marguerite gently gave Roxton's bandage one last pat and tried to smile.  "Well, John, when you get home, you'll have an absolutely stunning set of scars.  All your London lady friends are going to be _so_ impressed."

Roxton snorted.  "The only lady friend I care about is right here."  His head jerked around.  "You can't hear that?"

An uneasy vibration sent loose blue crystal shards skittering across the cave's gently sloping floor and cascading down toward a narrow entrance.  Six tons of motherhood prowled outside.  She'd smelled Roxton's blood on her dead babies and she meant to have the rest of him, preferably in pieces.__

Mama t-rex had chased them through the darkening rainforest, sometimes closer than death follows life.  Sometimes, like when they'd scrambled in here, much further behind.

_I've heard it's hell to outlive your children_, Marguerite mused.  "If you mean Mama Malicious thundering around out there, John, don't worry.  She can't get at us."

"Yes, yes, the t-rex, but there is something else.  Can't you hear it?  A sort of hum?  And there's words, too.  It's saying something."

Marguerite bit her lip.  Roxton was worse off than she'd thought.  He was hallucinating.  "No, John, I can't hear anything, but why don't you lay down, love?  Get some sleep."

Roxton shook his head and ordered, "Listen."

Marguerite carefully slid down to the floor and put an arm on John's shoulders.  He felt like a block of ice.  She hugged him and rubbed the bull neck.  She kissed his cheek.  "I'm listening."

Finding no humans to shred, mama t-rex began to move off, and the gut-deep vibration of her footsteps died away.

Two hours ago, just before sundown, she and Roxton had been hiking the last small rise before Stinking Springs Valley, looking for a dry place to spend the night.  The overgrown path had kept Roxton's machete busy.  He'd been looking back over his shoulder and telling Marguerite to take care where she stepped when he disappeared.  One moment he was there, smirking and swinging the big machete.  The next moment he wasn't.

Roxton hadn't made a sound as he fell and Marguerite had tracked him only by the giant ferns he slammed, rebounding off them like a ball in a tavern game.  Eventually the ferns had stilled.  "Roxton?"  She'd yelled then.  "Roxton?"  A pop-pop of pistol shots had answered.  It had taken her an eternity to get down there.

Marguerite shifted her buttocks on the crystal gravel.  The night had been still for quite some time and Roxton really needed to sleep.  "You know, it might be a good idea if ..."

"Listen, Marguerite," Roxton insisted.

The t-rex gone, only the ker-thumping heartbeat in Marguerite's forearm filled her ears.  She dropped her arm and that faded too until finally she heard it -- a thin, wild trilling, a fairy song.  "I hear."

"What are they saying?  Can you make it out?" he asked, turning toward her, a seriously miscalculated move.  Gasping a heartfelt, "Damn," Roxton slid to the cave floor.  Afraid to touch him, Marguerite vacillated and waved her hands around as he sank down.  His breath whooshed out in a huge sigh.  His eyes closed.  The thick shoulders relaxed.

_Safe_, that's what the fairies were chirping.  _You're safe._

With two trembling fingers, Marguerite checked for Roxton's pulse and muttered a quiet, "Thank God."  He'd fallen asleep, like any reasonable person might after running through the rainforest for an hour, shedding a pint of blood and missing dinner.  As Marguerite normally would herself.  With the back of her fingers she caressed his sunken cheek and smoothed a black eyebrow.  "Sleep, love.  I'll watch."

_But why push yourself so hard, Marguerite?_ a tiny chirp demanded.  _There's twenty feet of rock between you and that rex.  You're safe here.  See those fairy crystals?  They'll keep you safe.  Just believe in the crystals._

"Who said that?" Marguerite asked the walls.

The fairy song continued to titter and pitter.  _Safe, safe, safe._

Marguerite just needed to trust the fairies, to believe.  It all made perfect sense.  Hadn't fairies watched over the Challenger party, sending aid and answers when needed, healing wounds, repairing hearts?  Without them, the whole Challenger expedition might have died in the balloon crash that stranded them here.  Or missed meeting Veronica.  "Or I might have missed loving John,_"_ Marguerite whispered aloud_._

_Safe_, the fairies sang to her.  _You're safe in a fairy cave.  Safe and sound._

Yes, why not sleep? Marguerite told herself.  A whole mountain held the mama t-rex at bay and one couldn't find any place in the world more protected than a blue fairy cave.  Both she and John needed their strength to hike back to the Treehouse tomorrow.

It felt so right to be here, and weren't they safe?  Marguerite slipped down to lie beside Roxton's warm bulk.  She nestled her head up to his.  He didn't stir.  Listening to the reassuring rhythm of Roxton's strongly beating heart, Marguerite closed her eyes.

_Safe_, the crystal fairies sang to her.  Fairies wouldn't lie, would they?  Tonight she and John would be safe.  With a last sigh, Marguerite fell deeply asleep.

The triumphant buzzing of tiny wings filled the air.


	2. A Ton of Fairy Dust

"That took just a _ton_ of fairy dust!" Queen Andrea squeaked.  "Do you have any at all left, Gabrena?"

Lady Gabrena Holtenrosa Raslan, the Queen's minute lady in waiting and actually half a hair shorter than her Queen, held up a tiny empty palm.  "I've used all I had, Your Majesty."

"Well, we've put them out for the night, Gabrena.  What now?  The dust was your idea.  I still say dead is better, but I'm open to suggestions."  Queen Andrea fluttered down to sit on the tip of Lord Roxton's aristocratic nose.  Delivering a punishing kick to the septum between Roxton's nostrils (he didn't even twitch his eyelids), the Queen continued, "This one gave the Pollytods quite a scare, falling on them like that.  A fairy's crystal is her castle!"

When Roxton exhaled, Queen Andrea floated up a half inch.  When he inhaled, she drifted back down.

Lady Gabrena winged over to sit on Marguerite's less pronounced but still perfectly respectable nose, only to have her proposed resting place move away and an enormous human hand swat past.  "My goodness, it's not asleep yet!" the lady cried.  On gossamer wings no larger than an after-thought, the blue fairy fluttered to Marguerite's right eye and tugged up on a black lash.  Pulling out her wand Lady Gabrena tapped the moist eyeball and commanded, "Sleep and dream!  Dream and sleep!"

The woman's breathing immediately became deeper and slower, but that didn't satisfy milady fairy.  "It's resistant, this one!  I'd better check."  Zipping up six inches or so, Gabrena turned and accelerated into a high-speed swoop aimed at Marguerite's upper lip.  A hard hit buried Gabrena's wand half its length, stinging about like a mosquito bite.  Marguerite didn't move.

The Queen with her official wand of office -- a magnificent black baton carved from a stag beetle horn and the only one like it in all of fairyland -- imperiously gestured for milady to stop busy buzzing about and join her.  "It's dead out, Gabs.  Now get down here and talk to me."

Fairies are always hopping around or flying off, they don't like being still.  Lady Gabrena fluttered down reluctantly like a drifting leaf.  Landing on Marguerite's now completely numb nose, milady sat down.  "Well, to answer your question, Your Majesty, I had such a wonderful inspiration.  Remember the fairy dust talking in this one's head?"  Gabrena patted the snout on which she sat.

Queen Andrea nodded her agreement and the lady-in-waiting went on.  "It believes it has fairy protection."

"No fairy in my flutterdom had better be messing with humans!  I haven't issued any permits, not this century anyway!  Who was it?  Who?"

A fairy Queen gets first pick of everything, including human lives to muddle, meddle and rearrange (the most popular fairy hobby after dancing, flower arranging and spell craft).  Queen Andrea began cutting tight, fast circles in the air, buzzing with anger.

When fairy royalty buzzed, it often leads to de-wingings and Queen Andrea wouldn't care who caught a trim.  Not only did de-wingings hurt a fairy (a lot!), it grounded them for at least six months so Lady Gabrena hastily hopped up to Marguerite's forehead and shouted, "No, no, Your Majesty, I think it must be the Avebury branch in England.  You know how they are -- always sticking their wands in where they don't belong."  The queen's buzzing stopped.  Lady Gabrena continued more quietly.  "The Avies wouldn't _dare_ show a wingtip here on your Plateau, but they're always jamming up the ley lines sending spells and portents about.  I can't get my own cantrips through half the time."

Like toadstools Avies popped up all over the world and they liked to brag that: "The far-fetched we do straight away, the impossible usually takes a wing beat."  This didn't endear them to other fairies.  Never before in ten million years of fairy history had a flutterdom made itself such a bore.

Queen Andrea hovered and gave Lady Gabrena an irritated look.  "So, Gabs?  This is all fascinating, but could you please get to your point?  I'm on a schedule here.  I have to finish saving fairyland by nine fifteen and get to the ball by nine thirty.  I'm leading the first daisy chain, you know.  A queen's got responsibilities."

_Oh, right!_ Lady Gabrena thought.  Since she'd been made queen, Andy had become such a total floater, and to think they'd once been best wing mates.

Milady Gabrena began to pace back and forth on Marguerite's smooth brow.  "So, Andy, I mean Queen Andrea, here's my idea:  What if we re-run the lives of these two humans but take away the fairy help?  See where they'd be?"

Queen Andrea executed a last loop-de-loop and barrel roll to show off her flying technique -- which was even for a fairy outstanding, one had to give her credit for that -- then she floated down to stand next to Lady Gabrena.  "I'm interested, but what's the point?  And I assume you have a point, Gabs.  You're my best counselor and I _do_ trust your opinion … most of the time."

Lady Gabrena took a tiny fairy breath.  She daren't tell the truth -- that she coveted this project for herself -- but lying to a queen was against fairy law, another violation punishable by de-winging.  So, in time-honored fairy tradition, Lady Gabrena beat around the elderberry bush … crumbled her cookie to the raisins ... dropped her dragonfly in the duck down.  In short, she equivocated.  "My queen, as you've pointed out many times, fairy protection is vital to human affairs.  They would all literally die without us.  So if you want to kill these two humans to protect the secret of the fairy cave, this is one way to do it.  And you'd prove your theory besides."

The queen looked doubtful, so milady added her next to the best argument.  "If it's the Avies helping them, it'd tell them to say out of your flutterdom!"

Queen Andrea rubbed her tiny pointed chin with the tip of her wand.  She looked thoughtful.  Lady Gabrena offered her crowning enticement.  "It'd make a great presentation for the next world-wide fairy convention in two thousand and five.  King Maltor would be _so_ envious!  Just imagine the subheadings:  'Humans cannot recognize their soul mate without fairy guidance.'  'Without fairies human lives are brutally short.'  There are a thousand possibilities."

Queen Andrea's face lit up.  She'd been longing to one-up King Maltor of Monloa for centuries.

"Alright, make it so," the Queen said.  "This will take years to complete and I haven't the time for another project right now.  My platter is full.  So you'll do it for me, Gabrena.  You must personally magic up, observe and document the entire re-working!  And to make sure this is a 'clean' case project, there must be no fairy help for _any_ member of their little group, including My Lady Plateau Protector, her husband to-be and that idiotic non-believer Professor Challenger.  Understood?"

Since this was all exactly as Lady Gabrena had planned, she barely choked back a triumphant chortle at Queen Andrea's orders.  But in a fairy heartbeat (and that is pretty fast) she managed a solemn frown.  After all, Her Majesty had said she wanted Lady Gabrena on this project full-time.  Milady just been committed next hundred years of her life to this little case study.  Although Lady Gabrena had turned five thousand and forty-two on her last birthday, a hundred years was still a lot, especially without a Mid-Winter and Mid-Summer holiday break.  "Yes, Your Majesty.  I'll watch them every minute and take lots and lots of wing notes."

Queen Andrea nodded.  "A _full_ report, Gabs.  Every time they twitch their eyelids I want an entry.  Leave nothing out!  Now I will leave you to your work."  Hopping off Marguerite's forehead, the queen fluttered just above the male human's dark, wavy hair.  She cried, "Remember I'll be expecting your report A.S.A.P. and no later than two thousand and five!"  She buzzed off, bound for the main crystal cluster and tonight's fairy dance.

Not until Queen Andrea had passed Lord Roxton's upturned toes did Lady Gabrena exclaim, "Whew!  That was easier than I expected!"  Twirling a triumphant pirouette, milady's feet didn't quite connect with Marguerite's forehead.  A light-hearted fairy is _really _light.

Now what spell should she use?  Golamnazo wahyus?  Morroptosis galmjor?  Banhy hayman usually got the puffball floating, even with strong-minded humans like these two.  But no, it couldn't be a standard chant.  They didn't have sufficient depth.

On the other wing, Queen Andrea had ordered her to observe, so Lady Gabrena must create an avatar with sufficient versatility.  What should she use?  Who or what could be there constantly but forgotten?  Milady smiled at a sudden thought.  No, no, a pair of dirty under things would never do.

After thinking some more, Lady Gabrena waved her wand and began to chant.

Flowing out of Lady Gabrena's miniscule mouth, swelling, shining, brightly colored WORDS and flitted through the fairy cave like flocks of fat butterflies.  Swollen syllables kept time with Lady Gabrena's chant.  Space, time and yesterday pulled together.  Fairy WORDS roared.

From the tip of Lady Gabrena's wand crawling, shivering red rune lines of "Return, Rewind, Repeat" flowed to outline Lord Roxton's sleeping form.  Creeping blue strings of "None and Undone This One" trimmed Marguerite.  The two humans were soon coated with the spell's binding, powerful Words.  The cave's crystals sparkled and flickered back the red and blue lights.

By the time milady reached the crucial rhyme -- "Hey Montis Eye Wallera, Cannos Vol Mal Tena" -- the WORDS were pinging off the cave walls and ponging off the floor and ceiling.  Faster and faster and more and more WORDS flew until there was nothing left in the cave but the roaring, barking and flowing of the WORDS, the two humans and Lady Gabrena.  The fairy crystals were gone, the floor and ceiling were gone.

Then it happened.  Folding one limb at time like origami cranes, the humans and Lady Gabrena disappeared.  In only a blink of your eye the fairy cave returned to normal.  There was nothing left behind, not even a WORD.

At the fairy ball the first daisy chain had just ended.  All the attendees and Queen Andrea zipped out into the cave looked about.  "My, what a ruckus!" the Queen said to Lord Buml who was fluttering right beside her.  "I'll say one thing for Gabby, she brews a mean spell.  We'll see where she goes with it."

Everyone went back inside.


	3. Cold Closet, Warm Heart

It was cold in the closet, almost as cold as a Parisian street in January and about as lonely.  Miss Marguerite Smith, occasionally known as Marguerite Krux, who had for a time been a Baroness, and a Duchess, Mrs. Fromeyer and Mrs. Montreau and for a while during the Great War Parsifal, peeked out through the storage closet's keyhole.

The Sully wing of the Louvre had closed twenty-six minutes ago.  The last of its curators would leave in four minutes more.  Parisians were very precise about the end of their workday.  A good dinner required plenty of time, both to shop for fresh ingredients and for the preparation; and if you could believe the Parisians, a well-cooked meal was life's greatest pleasure.

Marguerite's pleasures ran in other directions, and she couldn't cook dinner for a dog.  She didn't have a dog.

An experienced thief looked for weaknesses.  Marguerite had built her strategy for tonight's job around the staff's regular, predictable schedule.

Holding her watch up to a droplet of light oozing through the keyhole, she checked the time.  Three minutes to lock down.  That idiot of a watchman would be here soon.

Xan wanted a certain piece the Louvre had recently acquired.  Marguerite had left the sketch in her room, but she already knew just where the piece was -- the second cabinet from the left, top tier, rear row, third item from the right end.  Label:  South American artifact, possibly Incan, 1200 A.D.  Acquired Venezuela interior, 1920.  Maple White Collection.

After taking both the medallion and its label, Marguerite would re-arrange the remaining pieces then creep back into this closet to wait for morning.  Tomorrow at about ten, when the Louvre staff finished opening up and there were at least a few visitors meandering about, she'd step out and leave.  It was as simple as that.

It would make a long, uncomfortable night.  But she'd spent worse ones in bed with her fourth husband, the Baron.  He'd had a fondness for certain … pleasures, ones that didn't involve food, at least not in the usual sense of the word.  And he'd snored.  Marguerite had been immeasurably grateful when the Baron had had the uncommon kindness to die.  If he'd only left her something besides the bad memories.

Like most of Xan's acquisitions, the medallion -- a spiral whirling within a triangle -- probably had mystical significance, but Marguerite would be damned if she knew what.  And working for Shanghai Xan, it never paid to care.  He had a ways of crushing the most curious cat.

She looked at her watch again.  Three minutes and a few seconds left.

The notes on her sketch had said the piece was hand-tooled from iridium.

Iridium?  Now if that didn't back memories.  Marguerite had been more-or-less respectable in the Great War, as far as spies were respectable, which wasn't far, but at least more so than a sneak thief.  Early in '17 there'd been a fabulously complicated triple-cross gambit involving a phony iridium theft, designed to worm Marguerite further into German high command.  As a result of the gambit, some brave British officer had gone to jail in her place; he'd been a stranger, someone she'd never met and never would.  Her heroic protector.

Marguerite reminded herself that heroes were people too stupid to run when the shooting started.  Or those that were left behind lying on the ground.

Not quite two minutes left.

Out in the hall a weak baritone sang "Cher Ami," a song currently popular in the Parisian bistros.  He'd reached the third line of the first stanza.  "My friend, you are gone and my room is dark …"

Yesterday evening at closing time, Marguerite had asked the night watchman to show her the fastest way out.  He'd taken her down the long flight of marble steps that descended from Venus De Milo, past the Mona Lisa and to a side door opening on Boulevard de ##.  She'd tickled the fat old watchman's double chin and cooed a "merci beaucoup."  He'd drooled.  The song faded as the watchman strolled further down the hall.

One minute.

Marguerite stood up.  In the small closet, she hiked up her narrow skirt; and pulling her right leg up behind in a graceful ballerina-like pose, she touched her buttock with a booted toe.  The broad brim of her hat brushed the wall as she bowed her head.  Putting the leg silently back down, she flexed the other then methodically rolled her shoulders and neck, flapped her arms, wiggled her gloved fingers.  Checking the small automatic pistol and sharp lock-picking tools in her beaded handbag occupied a few seconds more.  For luck, she fingered the heart-shaped gold locket around her neck.  She and that locket had survived a childhood of convent orphanages, the Great War, four husbands and three years of working all over the world for Shanghai's bloodiest warlord.  The locket's inscription kept her alive.  "For Marguerite. Always in our hearts. Mother and Father."  She had nothing else to show she had a family, not even a memory.

A dress wasn't Marguerite's usual working gear and only fat farm domesticated cows wore sacks like this.  When Marguerite finished this job, she'd make a bonfire of it and dance around like an Apache.

She looked at her watch one last time.  Fifteen seconds.

The scratchy baritone "Cher Ami" returned, repeating the same stanza as before.  Either the watchman had started the song over or he only knew the first verse.

An electric light switch clicked off and the ribbon of light under closet door disappeared.  On the other side of it, the door of exhibition hall number seven slammed shut and its lock snicked.  Another and more muffled line of verse and further away another door slammed and snicked.  Then a few almost inaudible words of the song and another slam and snick.  And another, and another.  All progressively further away.  Finally, the first floor of the whole Sully wing of the Louvre was locked down.

It was time.

Rows of glass-lidded cabinets shimmered in moonlight oozing through windows overlooking the Louvre's enormous courtyard.  Any light in here would be seen outside.  Marguerite had to commit her crime blind.  To sensitize her fingertips, she'd been wearing gloves full time for days.  She pulled them off and put them in her bag.

The cabinet wasn't locked.  Marguerite snorted at the careless mistake.  By the end of the week, at least two Louvre employees would be out of a job: the curator currently in charge of the Sully and that slob of a night guard.  Whatever.  Just one less hassle for her.  Brushing her fingertips on each piece on the row, Marguerite counted the articles she'd memorized.  One -- the carved bone whistle from Bolivia, two -- the heavy gold ring from Mexico (too bad she had to leave that!), and three -- her goal.  It felt warm.  How odd.

Xan didn't take kindly to rookie mistakes and Marguerite wouldn't get a second chance at this snatch.  She must make sure she had the correct item.  Carefully picking up the medallion with her fingertips, she brought it close to her eyes.

The room flickered.

For a few seconds the Louvre wasn't around Marguerite, but open space, a black night but with stars and moon overhead instead of a painted ceiling and a campfire a few feet away.  Beside it a human shape reclined.  Marguerite saw that in the space of a gasp.  It disappeared and once more she stood in the moonlit Louvre.

"Oh my god, what was that?" Marguerite tried to whisper, but she made no sound.  However, around her the glass display cases began to rattle, bang and jump about, their legs pounding up and down and back and forth on the bare marble floor, much like frightened horses pounding turf.  They vibrated hard enough that the lids and sides began to shatter.  Glittering in the moonlight, a cascade of gold, silver, and glass spilled out onto the floor.  One of the room's tall windows split down the center and collapsed.

Loosely woven strands of green, yellow and blue light whirled out of the medallion and wrapped around Marguerite.  A wind howled from nowhere and blew the hat off her head.

Around Marguerite the night flicked again, but the new scene wasn't the same.  This time there was no campfire, moon or stars, just a warm rain falling on her face.

Another shiver of night and Marguerite flicked back to the Louvre.  Raindrops sparkled on her dress like sequins.

By this time every display case had shaken to pieces and every window had collapsed and still the rumbling escalated.  The room's plaster walls began to crumble.  Powder filled the air.

It was Xan's medallion.  The medallion was doing this to Marguerite.  And she couldn't put it down.  She couldn't move.  She couldn't even speak.

In the corner of her eye Marguerite saw the bright beam of an electric lantern.  The dim-witted night watchman stood in the doorway, holding his pistol awkwardly before him like it was a baguette sandwich.  Clearly he'd never drawn his weapon before.  His loose mouth worked like a fish as he took in the fantastic scene.

Around Marguerite the room flicked and became the open space.  It had changed.  A campfire blazed to the very heavens and racks stood by it, stark as black skeletons.  The human shape poked at the fire and on the far side of it something large and dark moved.  Another flick and the Louvre returned.  Flick, the open night and a slightly different scene.  Flick, the shaking Louvre.  Flick and flick and flick.  The scenes changed at a faster rate, and each time Marguerite spent less time in the Louvre.

In flashes, Marguerite saw the night watchman raise his gun.  She couldn't open her mouth to scream or beg the man not to shoot her.  The pistol flashed, she heard a pop.  One last time the Louvre flickered out.


	4. Dinosaur Advice

"Well, do ya think she'll be back tonight, Cammie?" Lord John Roxton asked his companion beside the fire.  The dinosaur's yard-long head swung around and a huge eye squinted at Roxton's face.  Cammie didn't have anything to say about ghosts so Roxton saluted his half-asleep pet with a nearly empty wine jug and followed that up by downing another swig.

Leaning back, he tugged his loincloth into a more comfortable place.  At home at Avebury Manor, Roxton's hunting dogs wore more clothes, but it was either the loincloth or the way God made him since Roxton had almost nothing left fit to wear.  He'd already re-soled his boots twice.  Now the tops were rotting, and as for his trousers and shirts, even Worth himself couldn't have repaired all the various raptor rips, sword cuts and insect chews.

Cammie, seeing nothing that needed her attention, swung her head away from the bright campfire and stretched out on the granite shelf.  She was asleep again in seconds.  Cammie was short for "chameleon-asaurus," which was in itself had been a nickname bestowed by Malone as Summerlee's scientific designation had been unpronounceably long.  It had, of course, included "summerleasis" or was it "challengersis"?  He couldn't remember anymore, at least not tonight.  And he'd just as soon not think about that devious bastard Malone.

Behind Cammie an irregular slash in the cliff side soaked up firelight and marked the entry to Roxton's home.  Overhead a moonless, star-spangled black canopy slowly spun the night away.

Roxton ran a hand across Cammie's soft hide, and the cooling reptilian body stirred again groggily.  "Sorry to keep you awake, old girl," Roxton whispered as he leaned forward to poke at the fire.  "But it's a hell of a thing when a man lusts after a bloody haunt.  Sure could use your thoughts on the subject."

_Actually_, Roxton thought to himself, _I could use some reassurance that I'm not out of my mind._  This Plateau never let up.  Dinosaurs, Amazons, pseudo-Roman talking lizards, and fire-breathing dragons, Roxton had seen them all, and this month he could add a bona fide ghost to his list of peculiarities.  Running his fingers through the loose stones on the ground, Roxton found one to his liking and threw at his fire.  A spate of sparks blew out and floated up into the Plateau's night sky.  The Plateau was a damned weird place to live.  Every little thing took an odd bent.  Worse than Avebury at its spookiest.

It was also Roxton's prison.  Most likely he'd die here, and the sooner, the better as far as his head jailer, Malone's tattooed vixen Queen Veronica, was concerned.  Although Roxton could almost agree with her, he wasn't going to join Malone.  He didn't fancy harem life.

Roxton and Malone had been on one of their expeditions looking for Summerlee and Challenger when they'd stumbled onto a tribe of beautiful women whose lives seemed to focus on sex and the hunt, and who appropriately called themselves Amazons.  As there had been no men at all, Roxton and Malone had thought they'd found heaven.  Roxton, at least, knew better now.  The Amazons were demons and their Queen Veronica, with her weird, creeping tattoos, the Devil incarnate.

Hadn't she turned Malone into a mindless sex toy?  When Roxton had last seen Malone, he'd been standing behind his blonde queen dominatrix.  His face had been impassively cold while Queen Veronica pronounced Roxton's exile.  Malone had rested a hand on queen's shoulder and Roxton had seen Queen Veronica's tattoos crawling on Malone's arms, as though he'd been infected with them like a venereal disease … or a curse.

Roxton felt lucky he hadn't attracted Queen Veronica's fancy.  She'd favored Malone from the first.

Cammie hadn't answered Roxton.  She hadn't even raised her head.  The golden eyes were closed and the nose flaps vibrated to regular breathing.  For today's hunting Roxton had used spears instead of his usual bow and arrow.  That meant harder riding to get closer for the kill.  His steed must be exhausted.

Just as well.  Not much anyone, human or dinosaur, could say to help Roxton.  Being in love with a ghost was a sad state of affairs.  Showed just how much the isolation was getting to him.

Roxton had another thought.  "Then again, all my friends and family are ghosts.  Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on the lot of them."  His brother William, his father Lord Henry, Summerlee, Challenger, his Staff Sergeant in the Great War, Hagerson, and the whole of Company C, dead, the lot of them.  Only his mother survived, if you could call her frantic London socializing a survival.  Not for him it wasn't.  He'd rather live in a cave.  Wasn't it lucky that he did?

Roxton never knew when his ghost would show.  For weeks she'd materialized right over there next to Cammie's long tail, in the same exact spot below his doorstep every time, always gazing fixedly at her empty hands, her hair loose and flying about like black flames and her eyes huge and dark.  She was exquisite.  A goddess.  Perhaps she was the ghost of an ancient deity.  Yeah, that almost made sense in a Plateau sort of way, Roxton thought as he downed the last swallow of wine.  She was a goddess looking for her lost worshippers, Venus, Aphrodite, maybe even his personal favorite Diana, goddess of the hunt.

If Roxton had met her at a London soiree, he'd have known what to say.  But how does one chat up a deity?  Roxton had decided to ask her name and enroll as a believer.  So this evening as the tropical sun had gone down, Roxton had prepared.  He'd lit the usual evening campfire, pulled out the wine jug, and using Cammie as a convenient bolster, had leaned back to wait.

He was still waiting.  Based on his eyeballs, which felt like they'd been dipped in beach sand, Roxton estimated the time to be at least midnight, probably later.  She wasn't coming.

No doubt she'd left him.  Everyone else had.  Left him or died.

Rolling onto his knees, Roxton staggered to his feet.  Cammie's snake of a tail lifted a few inches.  The tip whipped about like a cobra, quivered and dropped back to the ground.  But the dinosaur didn't wake up.  "Some watchdog you are," Roxton grunted.

Unsteady from the wine, Roxton slowly skated his bare feet over the beaten dirt in what he hoped was the direction of the cave entrance.  Behind him a thin straight line of blue light silently drew itself on the black night.  His back turned to the phenomena, Roxton tottered unsteadily on.  The line rapidly brightened and rounded into the shape of a woman holding something close to her face.

The campfire crackled and spit higher, and the air hummed frantically in a cacophony of warbles and whistles.  Roxton spun around, overbalanced and unceremoniously sat down on the dirt.  Hard.  It pulled the loincloth up between his cheeks and squeezed his privates.  Suddenly Roxton was wide-awake.

Awake and happy.  His goddess had returned.

Cammie's eyes opened up.  She snorted gently and tried to sniff the sparkling shape.  She sneezed.  In two years of hunting with Cammie, Roxton had learned to trust the dinosaur's senses far more than his own.  If Cammie saw the goddess, she was real or at least really a ghost.

Cammie, Roxton and the night waited in silence, breathlessly adoring the visiting deity.  Roxton forgot to ask for a name; he almost forgot to breathe.

A sound like a pistol pop shattered the worship service and triggered a wonder beyond comprehension.  For Roxton's beloved ghost suddenly zipped from vague woman-shaped cloud to solid, softly rounded flesh … panicked softly rounded flesh … staggering, arm-flailing softly rounded flesh.

The goddess's tight-skirted Parisian walking dress -- and how long had it been since Roxton had seen one of those? -- hampered her balance.  Lurching two steps, she smacked up against Cammie and in a struggle to stay upright grabbed a piece of Cammie's riding harness and pulled hard.

Cammie, startled by this unexpected development, reared up on her powerful hind legs and staggered off in the general direction of Challenger Creek, dragging the entangled goddess like one of their fresh kills.  Although the night air made the dinosaur sluggish and uncoordinated, Cammie covered twenty feet in half as many seconds, the goddess thwacking behind and screaming more like a banshee than divinity.

Roxton ran after them trying to snag Cammie's trailing lead before she warmed up enough to take off at full speed. "No, Cammie!  Halt!  Whoa, girl!  Come back to papa!"


	5. Caveman Cantrip

"Don't get any closer," Marguerite said, her voice breathlessly croaking from her parched throat.  She'd been awake all of five minutes.  "I've got a gun!  Stay back!"  Waving her small automatic pistol for emphasis, Marguerite tried to sit up and discovered two things:  first that she was extremely stiff, with countless tender spots along her left side; and second, that under this soft pile of supple furs, she wore only her parents' locket and a bandage tightly wound around her lower ribs.  Nothing else.  In arising she'd uncovered her breasts.  She slid back under the furs.

Her caveman captor had looked unimpressed by the gun, but when she exposed her bosom he stood up and stepped away.

Grabbing a fur, Marguerite tried again to sit up.  A blaze of pain sent her back down.  She groaned a "Damn!"  That had felt like a cracked rib, maybe two.

Marguerite vaguely remembered a dark night and being dragged behind a moving mountain.  That explained the ribs.  This unmistakably male caveman was enough to explain her lost clothes.  He'd probably leered his fill while she was out … although he wouldn't look at her now.

Nothing but a lengthy bout of insanity or Xan's magic medallion could explain how she'd popped out of the Louvre and into a primitive cave in the middle of God knows where.

Damn that conniving bastard Xan!  Why hadn't he told her to keep hands off his prize?  Maybe he'd been trying to get rid of her.

Holding a simple wooden cup, the caveman squatted down beside Marguerite, the movement pulling his simple loincloth impressively snug.  His tanned thighs bulged.  A long beard and a thick twist of black hair hid heavily muscled shoulders.  He looked more concerned about her than frightened; and instead of backing away, he held out his cup, gently pushing aside her pistol barrel.  He grunted an invitation to drink.  Marguerite heard water slosh.

Quickly she jerked clear the little automatic.  "Stay back," she husked and licked her lips.  The water might be poisoned or drugged.

Her mouth felt like an Arabian sand dune.

The caveman pulled back his cup but stayed put.  Perhaps he didn't understand about guns.  He didn't seem frightened.

When Marguerite had come to five minutes ago, she'd first seen a low fire a few feet away.  In its flickering light, distorted outlines of men and fantastic lizards ran across a roughly rounded ceiling and down walls that had no corners.  Marguerite's bag, Xan's medallion, and bits and pieces of her clothing had lain on the floor by her bed.  A little to her right a muscular brute of a man had been working on a hanging carcass, his bare backside wagging in the firelight, a steel knife glinting in his hand.

A steel knife meant contact with civilization, even if it was third or fourth hand.  The caveman could get her home.  She _must_ make friends.  Without lowering her gun, Marguerite took a stab at conviviality.  "Hi.  My name's Marguerite Smith.  I'm your friend."  The caveman watched her and smiled.  "I'm your friend if you'll take me where you got that knife."  Silence.  "Speakee English?"  A yet more impassive silence.  Marguerite tried the same thing in French and Spanish.  No response.

Apparently growing tired of Marguerite's language lessons, the caveman put down his cup and slowly extended an empty hand.

"I'll shoot!"  Marguerite warned him.

The caveman didn't stop.  He began to click his tongue as though Marguerite were a cornered animal or a frightened child.  He continued to reach for her gun.  He was going to take it from her.  Marguerite would have to kill him and pray to God she could find some other help.

The caveman's bearded face was only inches from Marguerite, the pistol barrel rested on his unprotected stomach.  She pulled the trigger.

Instead of the comforting kick of a bullet, the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.  A gentle tug from the caveman, and Marguerite was disarmed.  Horrified, Marguerite shrank down under the furs.  Too weak to struggle or run, she was now completely at the caveman's mercy.

After rummaging a moment in the small pile of belongings by Marguerite's bed, the caveman produced a bullet clip.  He expertly inserted it, pulled the slide to chamber a bullet, and handed the pistol back to Marguerite, grip first.

"I think you'll find it works better now, Miss Smith," the caveman said.  He spoke English with boarding-school perfect pronunciation.  "And my name is John."  Pausing, John chuckled at some private joke.  "Welcome to Hell."

"Hell?" Marguerite gasped.  Where had Xan's horrible medallion taken her?

John grunted.  Picking up the water cup, with a gesture he offered to help her drink.  "My hell anyway.  You must be thirsty.  I couldn't get you to drink much while you were unconscious.  You kept mumbling something about poison."

Marguerite only looked at the cup in John's large, square hand.  Her head ached.  Her throat ached.  Her ribs ached.  She ached everywhere.

John frowned.  "I swear it's just plain water, Miss Smith."

With a quiet sigh Marguerite passed out.


	6. Wing Notes

Fairies sometimes turn cannibal.  Unlike cannibal human beings, however, a cannibal fairy is not necessarily insane or protein-deprived.  They're usually annoyed.  Very, very annoyed.

After watching Lord Roxton and Marguerite for just a week, Lady Gabrena would happily have eaten every Avie fairy ever hatched, given a proper sauce.  If they'd minded their own magic, she wouldn't be here watching this … this spectacle.

Bored?  The word didn't begin to describe Lady Gabrena.  She was as stiff, sleepy and cranky as a, as a, well, as a rusty nail.  Yes, a rusty nail.  And disgusted?  "Appalled" might be closer to the truth.  Lord Roxton and Marguerite fought constantly.  For a fairy to watch the endless warring without trying to help ... well, it went against every bit of proper fairy upbringing.  But because of the Queen's orders, all Lady Gabrena could do was take wing notes.  She'd already sent a dozen or so flying home for transcription as well as a footnote galloping after to tell Feathersmee, the court scribe, to hold the files open for eighty years or until Lady Gabrena returned.

Milady wrote down the whole gruesome circus in careful, meticulous detail.  How for the first few days Lord Roxton had carried Marguerite everywhere she wanted to go, even to the privacy chamber when she had the need, how he'd introduced her to Cammie and let the dinosaur lick Marguerite so it would know her anywhere and how Marguerite had squealed but permitted it, and how dashing Roxton had looked -- in a naked, primeval sort of way -- when he rode on Cammie's back bringing home something to eat and how Marguerite's eyes had glowed when she saw him.  At first Roxton and Marguerite had got along so well -- until they began fighting.

Marguerite and Roxton's first fight had started innocuously enough.  Lord Roxton had been tallying his calendar, a series of marks on the cave wall.  Finishing the count, he wiped a section of floor sand smooth and wrote with a stick, "June 29, 1922."

"You've been here too long, John.  That's wrong.  Years wrong," Marguerite had said cleaning under her nails with the point of the steel knife.  By that time she could comfortably hobble about the cave but spent most of her time sitting up in the bed.  Roxton apparently had totally relinquished title to that piece of furniture.  He slept in the storage chamber or outside with Cammie.

"Oh?  And just what date do you fancy, Miss Smith?"  Despite an invitation to call her Marguerite, Lord Roxton continued using "Miss Smith".  And he had yet to tell Marguerite his own patronymic, or for that matter anything about himself or the Summerlee expedition.  He'd told her only the basics:  that she was on an inaccessible plateau in the Venezuelan jungle and that it was filled with dinosaurs and other fantastic creatures.

On the other wing, Marguerite had out-and-out lied to Roxton, telling him that she was a museum curator spirited out of the Louvre by the magical medallion she'd been cleaning.  Needless to say, he hadn't believed her.  He'd grunted a skeptical, "Oh?"

Using a piece of leather to protect herself, Marguerite had leaned over and picked up the medallion in question from the litter by her bed and gestured for Roxton to take it.  "Here it is, John," she'd said.  "Why don't you take it and see where you poof off to?"

(_Oh great twinkle toes!_ Lady Gabrena had exclaimed to herself.  _It's the Trion!_  She'd heard of the Protector's emblem of office and it's mystical powers, but she'd never thought to see it.)

While Marguerite watched, her arms crossed, her chin thrust out, and somehow looking dangerous even though she was flat on her back and unarmed, Roxton had held the triangular pendant and waited for his maiden flight into magic.  Nothing had happened.

Roxton had stayed silent for quite a while, probably unable to think of words that wouldn't escalate their embryonic argument.  Finally he'd grunted, "Doesn't seem magical to me."  Marguerite's scowl had deepened.  Rolling toward the wall and pulling the furs closer about her (even on the hottest Plateau day the cave was a bee's whisker cool), Marguerite had tossed back over her shoulder, "You take it then.  Just keep it away from me."

Roxton wore the Trion on a leather cord around his neck.  Sometimes Lady Gabrena saw him fingering it, a sad, unfathomable expression on his face.  He often looked at Marguerite the same way.

Expertly flipping Roxton's steel knife into the air, Marguerite caught it by the haft and drove it point down into the bed frame.  "Hmm.  Let's see.  I've almost lost track of the date myself.  How long was I unconscious?  Three days?  That makes this … January 17th 1925."

Roxton had called Marguerite crazy.  There was no way he'd lost two and a half years, he'd said.

Marguerite, owning a more varied vocabulary, had called Roxton Neanderthal, stupid and brutal, adding synonyms in various dialects of Swahili, Tagalog and Chinese.

Roxton, who'd spent a fair number of years in Africa and China, had caught a profanity here and there and offered to wash out Marguerite's mouth with soap.  In answer, she'd struggled out of bed and limped outside.

With a swing of her long dinosaur neck Cammie had herded Marguerite back in.  It had been dark outside and Cammie didn't want her humans out and about, especially the one that couldn't properly walk.  Cammie had taken a definite shine to Marguerite.

"Get your damned dragon off me, John!" Marguerite had yelled.

"Cammie's a dinosaur, not a dragon, Miss Smith.  Specifically, an adolescent specimen of summerlesis., a chameleon-skinned bi-pedal omnivore weighing about a ton."  Marguerite's face had continued to gather thunderclouds.  "She's capable of forty on a dry track.  We've out run horses."  Still no smile.  "And she's a really good ratter, at least she was until she grew too big for the cave."

The argument had been the first of many.  As Marguerite's health had improved, they'd had almost daily confrontations about venturing away from the safety of the cave.  Roxton had told her to stay inside while Marguerite had demanded her freedom.  So far Roxton was winning.  After all Marguerite had nothing to wear … literally.

But amidst all the argument, confrontation and one-upmanship, something became clear:  Marguerite intended to leave the Plateau and she wanted Roxton's help.  He refused to give it.  He didn't explain about the Amazons or Queen Veronica's decree.

Marguerite offered to buy Roxton's assistance with her escape, although she didn't say what with.  She sobbed, she postured, she mended and patched all of Roxton's tattered clothes, and finally in desperation she tried to cook a meal and burned a perfectly good brace of spotted hares so thoroughly that even Cammie wouldn't eat them.  None of her had manipulations worked, especially the rabbits.

Then Marguerite sank to her very lowest level and for Lady Gabrena things started looking up … or rather down. 


	7. Forest Walking

"The man's totally bloodless!" Marguerite exclaimed as she whacked at the undergrowth, only to have a vine chew at her already ragged trousers.  She had to break her rhythm and carefully pull its prickly length free from the tan gabardine.  It had taken Marguerite most of a week to stitch this outfit from John's discards and look at it!  Just look at it!  Ready to return to the dustbin, and that after only a few miles of hard-worn progress!

She'd already had a narrow escape.  A flock of knee-high dinosaurs had chased her up a tree and kept her there a half hour while they'd barked and hopped around below.  She'd finally lost them when a herd of tall, feathered creatures, somewhere between birds and reptiles on the evolutionary scale, had trotted by and her erstwhile jailers had run after a laggard.  She'd stayed up there another fifteen minutes just to be safe.

Why hadn't John told her it'd be this bad?

Marguerite took an angry swing with the machete.  The whip thin branch she'd hit smacked her back.  To be fair, John had warned her.

Panting and sweaty from pushing her way through chest-high grass, ferny undergrowth and the nameless vines that slithered like thin snakes everywhere, snapping and wrapping her ankles as though John had ordered them to prove him right, Marguerite called a halt and leaned against one of several dead tree trunks nearby.  Her back skidded down the gray, smooth bark until she sat on a relatively dry bit of earth.

After a few peaceful seconds spent catching her breath and admiring the blackness inside her eyelids, she sighed wearily and took off her left shoe to inspect the blister developing on the tip of her big toe.  Her once respectable purple satin Parisian pumps with their pointy heels and toes had been selected for a night at the Louvre, not a mucky, yucky hike through a South American jungle.  They'd turned into fat cakes of sticky brick-red mud.

"All I want is to go home!  Why can't John see that?" Marguerite moaned to the shoe she held.  It remained reticent, which would be natural for a staid English shoe but bordered on the aberrant for Gallic, even allowing for the pasting of filth.

John couldn't see anything and was more close-tongued than her shoe.  Well, he could just keep his petty little secrets and rot here.  She was going home, now, today.  How hard could it be?  A plateau had an edge.  She'd find this one's and follow until there was a way down.  Who needed John anyway?

Reaching behind her, Marguerite vigorously scraped her shoe on the tree trunk then put it back on her foot.  "'Not interested' is he?  'Seen better'?" she asked her other shoe as she began working on it.  "I'll bet he's paid for every woman he's ever had."  The shoe prudently kept its peace as she continued.  "And paid double too!"  She jammed the second shoe back on.

Finished re-treading, Marguerite leaned back and experimentally huffed a few times, trying to sound both irritated and virtuous.  Even to her own ears, she sounded more like a frog in gastric distress and she didn't forget why she was out here.  Despite her best efforts, the memories were creeping back.  Again she felt John's soft mouth sucking hers and the tingles sparking under her skin and the hard male body beneath her and the trembling of their clasped hands.

Once more bright bliss, an ecstasy, a paradise of sensation buried her fears of tomorrow and yesterday or any thoughts but the moment.  She soared.  She flew.

Then once again John was pushing her off and rolling away and Marguerite was asking, "Oh, you like it rough?" and stretching like a cat to show John everything she had.  That's what men always wanted -- everything -- and John would be no different.  And he looked, despite himself he looked, and his eyes burned with something indefinable and dark.

And then John was making a sound between a snarl and a sneer and his sweaty chest was pushing her down, the weight heavy and hot, and his hands twining through her hair and his breath on her, smelling of male and harsh with his heat.  He looked ready for murder but Marguerite didn't move, hoping she was misreading and that he still wanted her.  She wanted him so badly.

And John was growling that cheap women cost too much. _ Take it somewhere else, Miss Smith_, he said_.  I'm not interested.  And I've seen better in …_

Marguerite hadn't stayed to find out where John had done his whoring.  She'd squirmed out of his hold and escaped.  She'd barely paused to snatch up her clothes, her gun and one of the machetes hanging on the wall.  Stumbling into the weak early morning light, she'd hurried down the gentle slope to the forest, buttoning up her shirt as she went, John's two-ton lapdog at her heels.  Cammie had followed only to the first thick banyan and then stopped, bawling disapproval.

Now five hours later Marguerite thought that between the two of them, Cammie and herself, the dinosaur had shown the greater intelligence.  Marguerite had no provisions, not even water or a piece of dried meat, and what kind of fool walked into a trackless monster-infested wilderness with only a long knife, a pistol and five bullets?  No, she was down to three bullets.  She'd used two when those little dinosaurs had chased her up the tree.

The answer, of course, was the kind of fool that wouldn't last a day on her own.  (And please let's not think about food again!)

Marguerite picked up her machete and considered the broad blade and square tip.  She couldn't survive out here for long and even if she found the plateau's edge and a way down, from what John had told her, the closest civilization, a small trading outpost on the Orinoco River, involved a week's travel by canoe through headhunter territory.  Although at the time Marguerite hadn't believed him, she did now.  All of John's incredible warnings of flying, running and leaping dinosaurs, six-inch insects and plants that ate you alive had proven true.  If anything, he'd understated the danger.

She'd been a fool … an idiot … colossally blind.  She had to go back and beg John's forgiveness if she wanted to live another day.  He'd forgive her, Marguerite felt sure of that.  She'd never met a man more gentle or kind.  He would forgive her foolishness and take her back under his protection.

The thick tree trunk behind Marguerite flexed and with three nearby trees began thunderously strolling through the rainforest, knocking down the banyans and palms in their path and trailing a solid thundercloud of flesh above.  A day was going to be too long for her remaining lifespan.  It had become measurable in seconds.


End file.
